Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole. – Frank Moore Colby
There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poets bombast! – Jean De La Bruyere
And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be Civil War – not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all. – Michael Haneke